Your guide to the WordPress universe
We’ve been getting a lot of positive feedback about our P2 Reloaded theme on P2Reloaded.com. Thanks for all the support including feature and bug fix requests. We’re happy to announce a beta version of 2.7.
A few days ago we mentioned that OnSwipe released their plugin/theme combo to easily make an iPad friendly version of your WordPress site. We took a look at it today and we’ll fill in some of the blanks that aren’t obvious until you actually try it and look around the UI. Basically this plugin will almost “auto-magically” convert your existing WordPress site into an iPad friendly site.
Still confused to what this will do for you? If you’re using a modern WordPress theme, this plugin will automatically “convert” your WP site into something that looks like it’s custom-made for the iPad. People visiting your website on a regular desktop/laptop browser will continue to see the regular WordPress theme and people on an iPad (it doesn’t work on iPhone yet) should see a special version of the site.
Let’s walk through a typical installation. For this example, we’ll use a test site for one of my clients, “Beautiful Day Photography.” I am currently converting her site from Flash to WordPress (yay!). On this project for now I am currently using the Graphpaper Press theme Modularity.
So once you’ve downloaded, installed, and activated the OnSwipe plugin, you’ll go to Appearance and select the OnSwipe options. You’ll see a control panel like this:
We tried to upload a transparent PNG logo but it didn’t like it until resized it exactly to 200×200. You can choose which image to display on the home (“launch”) page. You can also select from a set of non-standard web headline fonts and a skin background color. There are no other options on the backend other than this panel. One thing we noticed is that there isn’t a way to specify an iOS home page bookmark/launch icon in this interface.
So what will your visitors see? Your custom logo will appear on the splash page of the site when a visitor goes to the site on an iPad. The user will have to swipe their finger right to left to “open” the page.
Next they’ll see a page like this:
As you can see this plugin was able to take the home page content using the Graph Paper Press theme and reformat it automatically for the iPad’s screen size. It even displayed the NextGen photo gallery on inner pages as well. Unfortunately there’s no swiping support built into NextGen gallery plugin yet so the experience isn’t seamless as it could be.
One of the things we noticed is that for now OnSwipe plugin isn’t going to do anything for iPhone 4 Safari or Android web browsers yet. We’re surprised that this plugin doesn’t support iPhone Safari since it’s essentially the same thing as an iPad.
If you’re looking to set up a quick and easy iPad experience for your WordPress site, you can’t beat OnSwipe and best of all it’s now free. If you’re site happens to be on WordPress.com, you’ll notice that Automattic has already added this plugin for you.
Get it: OnSwipe theme/plugin
Update: Here’s a quick preview plus video of the newest version of OnSwipe coming in late June!
If you have seen a WordPress theme that you’d like to use but don’t like that it shows a full post and want to show only an excerpt? Don’t fret, as modifying the theme to show only excerpts is pretty easy to do.
This assumes that you’ve edited WordPress theme files before and I recommend you have a back up of your theme files that you can easily upload to fix any potential problems but other than that it’s straight forward.
In WordPress admin, open Appearance -> Editor -> and select Main Index (“index.php”).
Then find the code:
php the_content('Read the rest of this entry »'); ?>
and replace it with:
<?php the_excerpt(); ?>
Note this code maybe not always be in the index.php file, it may been in a theme specific loop file. If you’re an advanced user, your best bet maybe is to add this to the bottom of your functions.php page via the instructions at WP Recipes.
Bonus – WordPress post excerpt resources:
The second thing you’ll want to do is to install the Better Excerpt plugin that will let you customize the length of your excerpt and replace the […] with your own text plus a hyperlink to the full post.
If you need more information on posts/excerpts, here’s a great post at Rarst.net.
Update: if you want the quick and easy way, check out the Evermore plugin mini review…
We’re happy to announce another update to the P2 / GTD theme that we’ve adopted as our own. In version 2.5, we’ve streamlined the notification process by letting you type in “@user” in the post field and upon clicking on “post”, the system will send an email notification to the registered user’s email address.
[sws_overlay src=”http://wpverse.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/gtd-reloaded-2.5.jpg” title=”P2 Reloaded theme” subtitle=”P2 Reloaded theme” description=”” thumb_width=”320″ thumb_height=”197″ icon=”red” Align=”sws_overlay_left”] [/sws_overlay]
We also fixed a bug from the original Templatic theme that didn’t show the site/blog name as the sender’s email address. We also made it so when you first activate the theme, the calendar, tag cloud, recent comments widgets are automatically activated. The theme carries over the GPL from the original P2 theme by Automattic. Update: Visit our P2 Reloaded.com site for on-going development.
[CSSBUTTON target=”http://wpverse.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/p2-reloaded-2.51.zip” color=”ff0000″]Download P2 Reloaded[/CSSBUTTON]
Here’s another WordPress theme finder, that’s not as visual as WP Candy’s but nevertheless may be useful for some. It’s called QualiThemes. We like it as it includes both free and commercial themes and you can rate them. Our nitpicks: the original theme developer doesn’t get listed on the page and the drop down menus to filter the themes could use some visual work and spacing.
We also noticed there’s a huge list of awesome WPshortcodes at WordPress Answers by Stack Exchange including: delay RSS posts, add excerpts to pages, customize the order of the admin menu navigation, and profile the database performance.
Get it: QualiThemes | WordPress Answers
Editor’s note: This week we have a friend and guest writer: Lori Berkowitz from Bee Dragon give us some insight as to why she thinks the Studio Press’ Genesis framework is the greatest thing since sliced bread. We reviewed Genesis from earlier this week from a content creator’s perspective, so here’s a coder’s perspective.
From a developer’s point of view, I have a huge crush on Genesis! I have become somewhat of a “Genevangelist”. The amount of time Genesis has saved me in the past year is incredible. I can build custom page templates in minutes and that is just the tip of the iceberg. I’ve been working with it for a little over a year now and have built quite a few sites using child themes, either completely custom or built from one of the child themes.
Genesis provides a lot of hooks, some filters, some shortcodes, and other handy developer friendly features, but my favorite function is genesis(); It allows you to make a page template by adding whatever hooks, functions, html, etc. that you want the page to have, followed by genesis(); The genesis() function will completely render the appropriate page type and follow whatever instructions you gave it in the rest of the file. For example, a page template for a custom post type could look like this:
php // Template Name: Template Name Here
remove_action('genesis_loop', 'genesis_do_loop');
add_action('genesis_loop', 'custom_loop');
function custom_loop() {
global $paged;
$args = array('post_type' => 'PostType'); // any wp_query args can go here
genesis_custom_loop( $args );
}
genesis();
If you are interested, I have been collecting Gensis snippets here.
The source link on some snippets leads to other sites with lots of useful Genesis info and tips.
Earlier this week we took a look at WP Mosaic, an up and coming new framework.
Today we’ll take a look at Genesis by Studio Press. It’s been around a bit longer and while it does not have as many layout options like WP Mosaic, it’s a mature product. We also bought the Corporate child theme which is a very square and grid based layout. Here’s an example of a real world site using Corporate.
In the Genesis control panel we found some neat settings like a global enable/disable comments and trackbacks. Some of the standard Genesis features would normally be part of 3rd party plugins. The ones we like are automatic bread crumbs, sorting of categories, and control of excerpts on archive pages.
On each post or page there’s strong SEO integration so you’ll need to install one less plugin.
Genesis (like Woo Themes) also had a way to import/export theme settings, something we wish more themes would have. It’s useful for moving sites from one URL to another if you’re not in the mood to move the entire database files over.
The Corporate child theme home page is built using a lot of widgets. Normally you’d have to drag text widgets over to the sections but Genesis includes custom post widgets that you can drag over the widget areas to pull in select posts from categories. Of course you can also use other widgets on the home page modules.
So what didn’t we like? The gallery slider that is shown in the demo site needs to be manually downloaded from WP.org and activated. We’re not sure why they can’t just integrate an image slider like other many WordPress themes. There is both a video and web page tutorial that’s available. We noticed certain settings like turning off the site title text in the header, require check marks to be turned off in both the Genesis main admin panel and the header control panel.
Regardless of these minor annoyances, when we had questions, the friendly and knowledgeable tech support at Genesis forums answered our newbie questions quickly.
We’re impressed with Genesis so far with its set of rich features. We also like their simple pricing model of $90 for the Genesis and child theme with life time support and updates. There’s no club monthly or developer’s fees to worry about. If you’re looking for a solid, well supported theme, Genesis is a great choice!
Looking for a simple and easy to install project management tool? We first wrote about GTD and P2 a few weeks ago. We are so enthusiastic about it that a version of that is becoming the first theme released on WPVerse.
What’s new? We’ve added the ability to send notifications of brand new topics to users.The templatic version of theme had notifications built in but only after someone replied to the original topic.
Our version lets you click which registered users to send a notification right above the post button. We’re planning on adding categories and a set of default widgets. Let us know if you have any other feature requests.
Special thanks to Valery K and Jam Studios for their work on this theme. Because the theme was originally released as GPL, you’re of course welcome to modify and distribute this theme as much as you want.
Download it: WPVerse modified GTD
This week we’re taking a quick look at a new WordPress framework called WP Mosaic. It’s still in beta but we were pleasantly surprised at the amount of granular page layout controls baked into the GUI. There are some unique features like an overlay mode which lets you take a look at what which modules you’re modifying. When we mentioned to them that the popular Dynamic Content Gallery plugin didn’t work with their theme, they fixed it very quickly amongst adding other new features.
So if you’re looking for a company that’s responsive to their customers, WP Mosaic could be a great choice. We look forward to seeing what else they have in store for us!
Get it: WP Mosaic
Our friends at Theme Forest have introduced a new way to find WordPress themes even easier with their “WP-Select” program. They’ve started with 50 hand picked themes and have even introduced a layout finder with a way to filter by colums/rows and colors. Read more at Envato’s blog.